Dish TV bringing live sports to the Internet is a monumental deal

[Shawn Knight]

There’s no shortage of services that let users watch TV and movies over the web but the one hurdle that has kept many from cutting the cord is sports. Up to this point, there hasn’t been a reliable way to watch live sports over the Internet and for the millions of sports fans in the US, that’s reason enough to stick with a traditional cable provider.

Dish Network, however, is aiming to change that. At the Consumer Electronics Show, the company announced that its long-awaited over-the-top television service, Sling TV, will break the mold and finally give sports fans a compelling reason to cut the cord.

Priced at $20 per month, the core Sling TV programming package will include the following 12 Nielsen-rated networks: ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, ABC Family and CNN.

For an additional $5 per month, consumers can sign up for add-on packages like “Kids Extra” and “News & Info Extra” that includes Disney Junior, Disney XD, Boomerang, Baby TV and Duck TV as well as HLN, Cooking Channel, DIY and Bloomberg TV, respectively. A “Sports Extra” package is also in the works, we’re told.

Depending on what channels the Sports Extra package includes, this could indeed be a viable option for die-hard sports fans – especially if you pair it with an antenna to pick up local HD channels for free.

Sling TV will be available without a contract, commitment, credit check or hardware installation. Instead, subscribers will access content through the Sling TV app that’s expected to be available on Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Google’s Nexus Player, select LG Smart TVs, Roku players, Roku TV models, select Samsung Smart TVs and Xbox One.

Customers will be able to pause, rewind and fast-forward most live channels and Video-On-Demand content. For certain channels, the service includes a 3-Day Replay feature that gives customers the ability to watch some shows that have aired in the past three days; no DVR is needed.

Support for additional streaming devices and smart TVs will be added in the coming months.

If you don’t think this is a huge deal, consider this: the two college football playoff games that aired on ESPN this past weekend were the two most-watched broadcasts in cable TV history. Bring that to the web and you have a recipe for success.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/59304-dish-tv-bringing-live-sports-internet-monumental-deal.html

 

[TomSEA]

This really is huge. That's all I've been waiting for is a method to watch sports other than subscribing to one of the big 3 providers (Comcast, DISH and DirecTV). Looks like that time has finally come.

 

[madboyv1]

This really is huge. That's all I've been waiting for is a method to watch sports other than subscribing to one of the big 3 providers (Comcast, DISH and DirecTV). Looks like that time has finally come.

The fact that this service is almost a la carte via add on services for a relatively small cost is just as huge for me. My biggest issue is of the few channels I actually watch regularly, they are almost all on the higher tier service which is almost a waste of money considering everything else I'm not watching...

 

[gamoniac]

Sweeeeet! Now that it's done, Comcast and others carriers will probably follow suit and say "me too". Good for consumers.

 

[TitoBXNY]

Great news indeed.

 

[MilwaukeeMike]

I wonder how this works. Meaning... ESPN can sell the rights to their own programming, but can they give access to the NFL games they carry? The NFL isn't going to let someone show their games without getting their cut.

 

[SNGX1275]

I wonder how this works. Meaning... ESPN can sell the rights to their own programming, but can they give access to the NFL games they carry? The NFL isn't going to let someone show their games without getting their cut.

ESPN doesn't carry anything other than MNF and a playoff game here and there. That IS available on WatchESPN now, and to have access to that you have to have a supported cable provider. The NFL is greedy, so perhaps you are right, but ESPN doesn't cover a large amount of NFL games.

 

[davislane1]

I wonder how this works. Meaning... ESPN can sell the rights to their own programming, but can they give access to the NFL games they carry? The NFL isn't going to let someone show their games without getting their cut.

The NFL isn't going to let ESPN broadcast much beyond what they do now. Allowing ESPN et. al. to broadcast a significant number of games would cut into their subscription rate for Sunday Ticket, as well as diminish CBS viewership.

That said, wouldn't it be nice to have an a la carte NFL package, where you pay a flat rate of $5-10/mo. per team, following only those teams you want to see.

One can dream.

 

[wiyosaya]

I'm a big ice hockey fan, but I cannot say that this package interests me. The ESPN channels carry a variety of games from various sports, but IMHO, there is not enough of any one sport to make it worth my while.

Being a former DishNetwork satellite subscriber, this package sounds like the same sort of drivel that they used to provide via satellite. In other words, it seems like they are applying the same sort of marketing strategy to their streaming service that they apply to their satellite service. As I see it, this is not a true ala-carte scenario, and as such, it has channels that I could care less about. Of the 250 channels that were in the satellite package I had, my wife and I regularly watched maybe five of those. At the rate of about $86/mo. it simply was not worth it for us.

Since the channel selection is so limited, I suspect that the included channels were the only ones with which Dish was able to negotiate a streaming contact. At least three of these channels, TNT, CNN, and TBS, are Time-Warner owned (note Time Warner has many more channels than this in their fold, like SyFy, USA, etc.), and I would not be surprised to find out that these particular channels are among the lower or lowest rated channels; if that is the case, then this deal is in TW's interest, but giving Dish higher rated channels to stream is not necessarily in TW's best interests. The ESPNs, ABC, and the Disney channels are owned Disney which, I suspect, has every interest in this deal since they do not own a wired or OTA distribution network - at least to the best of my knowledge.

Now, if this were a true ala-carte package where each channel was say $0.99/mo and I could pick my own with no upper or lower limits on the number of channels and a much more varied selection, say it were possible to pick from the 250 channels in their top-tier satellite package, I might go for it.

However, as I see this, this is some DishNetwork exec's pie-in-the-sky idea of cashing in on the streaming phenomena while offering no value for me - not that this package would not be valuable to someone else.

As far as the NHL goes, it appears that you can get the full season streamed for $99.95 which is a much better deal than the NHL Center Ice package I could have gotten with my DishNetwork satellite subscription. IIRC, the price for NHL Center Ice was something like $150 for the season via satellite. https://gamecenter.nhl.com/nhlgc/se...e&navid=nav-gcl-main&intcmpid=nhl-gcl-mainnav

 

[Kevin82485]

I wonder how this works. Meaning... ESPN can sell the rights to their own programming, but can they give access to the NFL games they carry? The NFL isn't going to let someone show their games without getting their cut.

I read in a different article from the Washington Post that you will be able to watch NFL games on ESPN with SlingTV, you just won't be able to watch it on a mobile device that supports SlingTV.